Going to hell in a handbasket

https://www.404media.co/reverse-engineer-anything-is-the-new-wild-west-of-ai/

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/117453572317032730

Hear hear. Point is to keep it out of the pool of good stuff though.

RE: https://phpc.social/@ramsey/117451064521285682

Good observation! AI in the loop breeds distrust.

We are living through what I would call a great unlearning, and therefore the death of expertise. @pluralistic summarizes this political and economic dimension in another scorcher.

We are not training juniors, we are substituting them with AI. Students in school will be cognitively impaired through consistent AI use, eroding their expertise and reducing their lived experiences to prompts. We are deflating our capacity to make sense of theory-free model output.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/06/nonfungible/

#AI

*tiny violin playing*

https://www.theregister.com/paas-and-iaas/2026/10/13/cheap-chinese-and-open-source-llms-could-trigger-trillion-dollar-ai-infrastructure-reset/5302774

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/117428759376078122

I've cut off collaborations because of this sort of shenanigans. I'm not sure it is worth investing in people who do this sort of stuff, and call them out, because they will just revert to the "it is just a tool" argument.

They also don't get consent, as they just fed your IP into the great LLM machine. If they pay it -might- not be used for training, or not. Ask some mathematicians how that went.

RE: https://lookingup.francois-rincon.org/an-open-letter-to-academic-colleagues-using-genai/

"At the current pace, there is soon going to be a Big Quit event of geological proportions for the academic world — and those quitting will precisely be those who have refused to delegate their cognition and have kept it functional by rejecting the Faustian bargain. Not a good way to prepare for a better future, if you ask me."

#academia #academicchatter

True icon in software-engineering. In contrast to the current, move fast and break things she came from an era where there was little to no margin for error.

"There was no second chance. We knew that. We took our work seriously, many of us beginning this journey while still in our 20s. Coming up with solutions and new ideas was an adventure. Dedication and commitment were a given. Mutual respect was across the board."

https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007

#MargaretHamilton

RE: https://mastodon.social/@tojiro/117388557531272078

Nothing quite screams `we will survive the nuclear apocalypse we will create` as "cockroach labs".

RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/117376964625851946

Sobering read. But winter is coming indeed, let us hope for spring too.

RAM prices going through the roof. Hold on to your aging hardware people. Optimize code for performance like you are sending someone to the moon using a pocket calculator.

https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/10/01/ram-supply-set-to-worsen-says-micron-as-ceo-celebrates-much-higher-prices/5300346

Looking beyond AI to what is the next hype by @tante. I think both the listed terraforming and automated/optimized democracy or governance by algorithm are solid candidates.

The financialization of nature through carbon and other credits is already a step into the direction of terraforming (if not a soft version). You only have to spend some time on LinkedIn to figure this out. Chances that it will be both are likely.

https://tante.cc/2026/09/23/the-next-hype/

Disturbing read suggesting the rise of Nazi Germany was driven by the propensity to violence. This is even more disturbing since most MAGA voters vote against their own interests, but do so because the suffering imposed on others. The cruelty is the point.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/01/hitler-lazy-criminal-slept-until-noon-rise-nazis-wrong

Contrary to what AI doomers proclaim, AI won't kill us through some AGI leap.

It will be callous people using AI. And in this respect we're already there - for a while now.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-ship

I would conclude that we've silently turned a blind eye to the bad side of this drone tech. It all exists, even in civilian form, but for long it was off limits in the offensive war context.

So, it is no surprise that you see posts like this from a well funded weapons producer. Much of the tech and know how is just "out there" (see the outback challenge).

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/nato-backed-startup-adapts-ai-for-autonomous-drone-recon-and-attack-missions/

Now getting training data for these machine learning models might be difficult. But then you realize that hyper-realistic games such as War Thunder exist, and games such as GTA have been used to train self-driving car models in the past. So even in absence of real scenery there might be options to train models quickly under various circumstances.

All the above can be achieved using cheap camera sensors, but might indeed require considerable computational power to run in flight (as movement makes the process time critical).

You can also use (monocular) structure from motion to differentiate objects which are hidden through optical camouflage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_from_motion

Now finding things in a military setting might be more difficult as things get camouflaged. However, additional information can be gleaned by using different parts of the spectrum. Both thermal infrared sensors (cheap ones) exist, while near infrared can be used to differentiate vegetation from green painted patterns.